Sustainability Stolen?

My bike was stolen yesterday.  I love that bike.  I have not owned a bike for many years because my first bike was stolen in college.  This bike was a gift from my parents.  It was a beautiful, comfortable, and small bike for my small height.  Perhaps this is my punishment for not having rode it in a month.  Perhaps its Karma for moving, for feeling too happy, for being too self-involved the last year, for not finishing my thesis, for my privelage.

Can I really call this sustainability stolen?  One cannot speak of sustainability without speaking of social justice.  The inequities of the world that have created this enormous catastrophe we are in.  It's not the person who can't afford a car that was buying gas from BP after all.  In the more grand scheme of sustainability, our planet would have died long ago if everyone lived as I do.  And I live more simply than many others and less simply than most.  Privilege does not exist without oppression. 

Perhaps it's Karmic for also owning a car.  Right now I'd gladly rather have my car stolen than my bike.  Maybe then I would stop feeling guilty for owning a car and feeling guilty for not having taken more advantage of the person powered transportation that was at my finger, er, toe tips. 

It's pathetic to mourn the loss of an item.  Something that is replaceable.  However, in our over consumptive culture it's quite the norm.  My only consolation is that I hope the bike was stolen out of need.  That the person is either happily riding it or has sold it for money to buy basic necessities like food or clothing.

Patchwork Quilt

I love quilts.  Especially quilts that were handmade by grandmothers and great grandmothers in their quilting bee. They usually have wonderful stories woven in with the stitches and fabric scraps.  An entire quilt can be made from fabric that had a former life.  Warmth from repurposing.  Quilting is, in my opinion, one of the few heirloom skills that is more prevalent than many others because of the rich history it supplies.  I wish I knew how to make a quilt.  I wish I owned one.  But I do know how to make use of a quilt as a metaphor. 

Olympia is my favorite patchwork quilt.
Beautifully rich in hues, fall sugar maple orange, heirloom tomato red, eggplant purple, the obligatory evergreen green, golden honey yellow, and every shade that exists within this earthy spectrum.
Each swatch has it's own political and social history, the cloth is never new.
It is made of some of the most unusual fabric-local and imported.
It is ever changing and shifting akin to the threadlike tributaries that erode and shape a hillside--slowly and subtly working their way over time but faster after an arduous or unceasing rain.
The stitching hints at a community that is at once unbreakable, and vulnerable to snags, time, and seam rippers.

I am newly part of this quilt and yet my heart feels as though a piece of it has been stitched in forever.
I believe that is what it means to feel at home when you are not near to what you've always called home.
I guess our hearts can be stitched into many quilts.  Some we carry with us, others we leave where they should lay.
Which is both liberating and melancholy at the same time.